


Batman: The Hounding

by Meridian_Handcrank



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Scooby Doo - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-06-02 05:48:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6553447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meridian_Handcrank/pseuds/Meridian_Handcrank
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a universe where Scooby Doo Meets Batman was written by Grant Morrison...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Batman: The Hounding

The halls of the Flugelheim Museum were almost completely still, all of the other guards released to their homes and the typical lockdown gates secured in place. There were only a few people still in the building, and only one and a half who anyone on the side of good meant to be there. Most of them were tripped-out junkies, staring at the art contemplatively, waiting for their signal to swarm and carry the piece off. Honestly, the man might have felt among brother with them, if the situation were different.

He and his dog hadn’t been in this time zone for more than ten hours, but it didn’t show. However-much they squirmed at anything else, they had stomachs of iron, and they took jet lag in stride. It helped that they’d both ridden first-class, an added perk of coming when the Bat called you.

They’d made landfall at the safehouse not two hours earlier, and the Bat had handed them a dossier on the painting, _Untitled_. It looked like any other modern art piece, four squares of equal size sharing a giant canvas, unrelentingly huge and anonymous. He told them they only needed to be there as witnesses for villains who could avoid being recorded, and they’d fallen for it out of relief.

It wasn’t true that they weren’t cut out for this line of work, they operated in it regularly, but never at this intensity. Less-involved the way they did it, with friends and only when opportunity struck. They went to the bad guys, not the other way around. For the Bat, trouble gave birth on his doorstep.

Then again, it was easier for Gotham’s hero to keep up the act, night after night. The Gang didn’t have those advantages, and the mere mortals could be fatigued even when they were victorious. At this point, fatigue was like a pendulum, pulled by some perverse unnatural gravity into deeper and longer down-swings. They kept making their excuses to stay in the Machine and chase the dream they’d shared back in that cramped town during the breakfasts of their lives. It was getting untenable, and as the months pushed onward life seeped through the cracks, but no one wanted to be the first one to let it rip them away.

Still, none of them had made much fuss when he’d been summoned, and he’d wondered if it would be better to get away from them for a while. He was their cat’s-paw in a way, or maybe their monkey’s, and he needed to air out like any other talisman.

He’d been the only person of the bunch who had seen the real supernatural, after van Ghoul had decided it was too dangerous to let Daphne remember. After all his promises to Miss Grimwood’s, for the safety of his charges. Those were benevolent, the memories he came back to when he needed his rest. Even though they laughed at him for flinching at the fakes, he understood that when evil came for him it could just as easily wear a mask. The Gang was young at heart, and ignorant, and because of that it made the world a better place.

Sometimes he feared that whatever blessing kept them from teetering into the abyss and seeing what he’d seen would snap if they stuck around him too long. Sometimes he wondered if his old, beaten=up Mystery Machine would’ve driven them past the minor evils of the world if someone else had put eight years of love and elbow grease into it.

Still, he’d been Touched by the demons of the Earth, and he suspected the Bat, who was part demon himself, could smell it on him.

When they’d first encountered each other, with Captain Stingaree and the bodies in the cave, he’d been a gargoyle. The rest of the Gang hadn’t seen it, or hadn’t wanted to; to them, he was just one more man in a mask. To him, they were just one more set of temporary allies, one more group of civilians to keep an eye on.

The halls were cold this late at night, even though the lights were still on. They yawned without moving, and Scooby didn’t look very long down any corridor. They occupied themselves with staying near their painting, studying it, getting lost for disparate moments on the red, blue, yellow and green, each one a single unbroken hue like the artist had splashed a whole paint-can on the canvas and made it turn out neat and square anyway. There was skill to it, even a certain liveliness, but it didn’t bear much gawking.

After a while they took to occupying themselves with the moon.

“Look, Scoob. You can even see a few stars around it.” He said, tracing them with his index finger as he sat on the tile. “You wouldn’t think it could be that bright, could you? Guess it’s ‘cus there’s not much light to get in the way here.”

Scooby nodded. “Reah.”

They dug into the snacks after a little while, keeping up their energy. While they chewed, there was motion behind them, the filling of a syringe, the quiet sizing-up, and then the cocking of a gun. They only noticed the last, and then they turned to see a man Shaggy would later learn was named Key, standing and watching and indicating them with the pistol.

He was bald, mid-thirties, and not in his right mind. The bags under his eyes told stories, and even as he swayed on his feet the gun stayed trained. He was used to this.

_Zoinks._

“Who hired you? Who else knows?” he said, and when they didn’t answered he cut the silence again with, “Or are you in the wrong wing, looking at the pretty art ahead of schedule?”

“I-I’m just here as a witness, man,” Shaggy said, suddenly realizing how far-fetched that sounded.

“Reah. Ritness.” said Scooby, although the man made no indication he’d heard.

“That’s a shame. Maybe next time the police won’t send in the homeless.” Key said, and raised the gun.

Then the lights went out. Not in sequence as the power failed to reach one node at a time, but all at once in a single buzzing cessation, an _anti-thunder_.

"The police are coming. They won't let you out of this building." sad the Bat, and in the wide open space his voice could've come from anywhere.

Shaggy felt relieved, the relief that comes when chaos finally fits a pattern. Then Key grabbed him around the chest, and the moonlight glinted on the needle at his throat, full of green taken straight from the painting. It buzzed this close to his skin, with an intensity that he hadn’t registered when he wasn’t so close to it.

“This is deadly to any individual mortal mind. If I inject you, you’ll die fully conscious. You’ll be aware of every breath until the last one. You’ll be able to feel the _exact moment_ of falling over the edge. I’m almost jealous. You got that?”

Shaggy gulped and started to nod, then stopped himself and whispered, “Y-yeah.”

“Good.” Key took a moment to breathe, and then called out to the all of the darkness that the moon hadn’t touched, “Turn on the lights and unlock the building, or he gets it.”

There was no response.

“I know what it is! It’s the Rainbow Beast, Batman!” Key shouted. “Did you really think the world would just forget about what you did, in that little nameless commune in South America? It didn’t. I got _visions_. Visions of what you did to its mind, spreading it out like making a skin lamp.

“Not that anyone who knew you would be so easily fooled as to think the colors really just burned things, or that you took on a Higher Spirit with a _log_. That’s what you were always there for, weren’t you? Just waiting for that eruption, so you could filch it.

“Well, I’m here to put them back where they belong. And once they’d trampled on your city, maybe the rest of the vigilantes will learn not to meddle with things beyond your ken.” His breath was hot on Shaggy’s neck and he was sweating, the muscles in his arm tensing every few seconds.

“Who put you up to this? The League?” asked the darkness, looking for an opening.

“The League is a _hydra_ , Batman, they don't need me. I’m just doing my part for the swamp they swim in.”

The Bat stepped into the moonlight.

Then, without any noticeable movement, the lights turned back on and the building opened itself up to them. Dozens of latches undid themselves in a frenzy of sprite-activity.

That’s when the rest arrived, all of the grunts who'd been parked throughout the building, and they grabbed the painting and marched their way out. It was a simple pathway, something that felt so easy compared to being stabbed in the neck with some _new_ horror. Shaggy kept up the pace, and Scooby trailed behind far enough to be a non-element, which he was thankful for. As the paintings came and left, receding in parallax and drawing them all to the front entrance, he felt a simple hope that he didn’t have to be a hero, and that he’d be leaving this city in a couple of hours on his own money if he had to. The moment he felt the hands move away was the moment it would be over for him, the game would be finished and he would still be standing.

That was when the Bat made his move. In sight, ahead of them, he spun and loosed a projectile, a metal bat on steel wire. It soared toward the needle, and then Key turned his whole body and Shaggy’s with it, and completed the last couple inches of movement as his arms tightened, and that was that.

When the needle sank in it hit his jugular, and the moment it touched blood the rest of the green on the painting leaped off of the campus and into the wound, taking the red and the yellow and the blue along with it. They swirled in his veins, under his eyelids, just beneath his skin, coexisting and coalescing but never turning into purple or orange or brown. They burned.

As the arms finally let go of him, Shaggy grabbed at his head, crying out. He felt the world drawing in on him, all of the proto-thoughts of a system of beings trying to take over the slot where his identity sat. He felt them, it, bearing down on him like Moby Dick on a rowboat.

And then, just as abruptly, he realized he was not alone any more. There was something other than him already here, something that had been around for years and years.

He felt the presence without seeing it, his face pressed into the tile and his ears occupied with natural alarms, but it said _Friend_. He felt that it had been waiting to move in for a long time.

With that space opened, suddenly there was room for a million more entities. The lie of cramped space, of simple identity, was revealed, and the sheer size of the void to be filled subsumed the invader, drew it in and made it docile. Shaggy wasn’t the invader, or the _Friend_ , and subjective moments later Shaggy realized that he wasn’t himself now, either.

_I contain multitudes._

As his eyes streamed with tears and his awareness expanded to fill the block, he felt all of the insects, the thrown-out pets, the rats most of all. There were all part of him, part of the process that was originally meant to join minds. Some small part of him realized, belatedly, that this was what the Bat had intended all along.

As the rest of the block came to life, a single dog, now mindless, ran into the night.

The grunts were the first things of human intelligence to succumb, and then Key, and finally the empty space reared its head to take the Bat, to complete itself as it swallowed Gotham and waited in its bed for Little Red Riding Hood--

And the Bat, whose very mind could cut, said _No_.

Severance, then, as the void fell away again and experience righted itself as the dominant aspect of reality. Shaggy collapsed, gasping, and so did all the others.

* * *

The Bat had to explain it to Shaggy, later, in long words and state-of-the-art projections, the psionics of his life. How Scooby never really conversed, only in his head, only because his mind was constantly communing, trying to draw other consciousness out into the open, make it more like him and absorb it. It could’ve been any animal, or any person, if the bond were strong enough.

Shaggy remembered the day when he’d ushered the others over to the dilapidated alcove, a lifetime ago when abandoned buildings hadn’t fazed him. The day he found Scooby, among the pups watched over by a pair of dogs, and he’d given them all names. Dada, Momsy, Yabba, Howdy, Ruby, Skippy, a whole litter, and once he’d named them they started talking, and his friends pretended to hear it all too. It was easy to forget things like that, or how that roadside puppy had claimed to be Scooby’s nephew after enough time around both of them. He’d just assumed it was real, he’d seen stranger things, and now he wondered if he’d shaped the rest of the world, too.

And it would happen again, because there was no cure.

They found the dog soon after, but he wasn’t Scooby any more, not really. Scooby was a part of Shaggy’s soul now; the dog was just an externality.

The flight home was long and boring, but the food was, as always, delicious.


End file.
